President Trump this week has gone from saying the U.S. will respond to North Korean threats with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” to clarifying those words were perhaps not “tough enough,” and to spelling out Friday, in case there were doubts, that the U.S. military was “locked and loaded” to counter any threat.

Military solutions are now fully in place,locked and loaded,should North Korea act unwisely. Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!

The comments are likely to attract criticism, given that they raise already high tensions with North Korea, a nation that now possesses intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.S.; is said to possess a miniaturized nuclear device it can fit into that missile; and has threatened in recent days to strike near Guam, the U.S. territory in the Pacific that is home to U.S. military bases. But the remarks also raise questions about what sort of response the U.S. is considering in the event the North Korean leader decides to flex his military muscles.

Trump, in tweets this week, noted the U.S. nuclear arsenal “is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before,” adding he hoped “we will never have to use this power.” It is widely believed that the U.S., the only country in the world ever to use nuclear weapons, will only use such weapons in the event of a first strike against its interests. Members of his Cabinet, have been quick to repeat that old saw: that while the U.S. prefers diplomacy, all options are on the table.

Still, the president has sole authority to use nuclear weapons. Members of his Cabinet who disagree have the right to resign, but the military is obliged to carry out the order. As Bloomberg News points out: “It takes just two ‘votes’ to launch the missiles. So even if three two-officer ICBM crews refuse to carry out the order, it won’t stop the launch” of nuclear weapons. Even if Trump orders the use of nuclear weapons, it is probably not a good idea for his military to refuse the order. As Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale University, toldThe Washington Post, the example of Latin American nations, many of which have modeled their constitutions on the U.S., shows that when militaries defy their presidents, the consequences are usually “terrible.” In other words, Trump’s order to use nuclear weapons may be unpopular, but the long-term consequences of the military’s defiance of a civilian president’s order could be worse.

This argument, of course, is based on the idea that North Korea will order a first strike. This, too, is seen as highly unlikely because while Kim might be the object of punch lines in the West, he is practically God in his own country. His control of North Korea is seen as near total. Any potential rivals for power have been quickly dispensed with. His fortune is worth billions. He is 33 years old. There is virtually no reason for him to use nuclear weapons. Unlike the Soviet Union during the Cold War, he does not possess the nuclear arsenal to threaten the U.S. with mutually assured destruction. Any use of such weapons by Kim would almost certainly assure his destruction. North Korea maintains its nuclear and missile programs are strictly defensive in nature to counter what it calls provocations by the U.S. and South Korea. What is likely, however, is continued North Korean missile tests in the Sea of Japan and elsewhere to show its military and technical prowess, as well as occasional nuclear tests.

There is, of course, the possibility that Kim orders North Korea to strike near Guam as early as next week, as his military said in great detail that it could. If those missiles land in Guam’s waters, the U.S. response could be conventional (non-nuclear) in nature. The U.S. military has a large presence in South Korea (28,500 troops) and Japan (54,000), and could easily target North Korea’s command-and-control capability, its nuclear programs, and its missile launchers. The consequences of such a response are likely to be catastrophic not only on North Korea but its neighbors: Not only are there more than 70,000 U.S. troops within the reach of North Korea’s short- and medium-range missiles, nearly half of South Korea’s 50 million people live about 100 miles from the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that separates the two Koreas. The loss of life would be horrific.

Having said all of this, the U.S. is not on a military footing in the region. There is no direct threat to the U.S. at the moment. The U.S. is unlikely to have international diplomatic support for the kind of military action Trump appears to be suggesting. Nor is it clear Trump is doing anything other than sending a message to Kim—a leader who not long ago he described as a “smart cookie” whom he “would be honored” to meet—that the North Korean leader should rein in his threats. The same could be said about the U.S. president.

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a “safe haven” law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family—nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Here are some readers with extra elements on this discussion—political, cultural, international. First, an American reader on the interaction of current concepts of masculinity and the nearly all-male population of mass gun murderers:

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study explores a strange paradox: In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions.

Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “STEM,” as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

According to a report I covered a few years ago, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries in which boys are significantly less likely to feel comfortable working on math problems than girls are. In all of the other nations surveyed, girls were more likely to say they feel “helpless while performing a math problem.”

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”